Meet the speakers
Steve Almond
Steve Almond is the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Candyfreak and Against Football. You can check those out here. His recent books include the novel All the Secrets of the World, which has been optioned for television by 20th Century Fox, and William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life. For four years, Steve hosted the New York Times Dear Sugars podcast with his pal Cheryl Strayed. He is the recipient of a 2022 NEA grant in fiction, and his short stories have been anthologized in the Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Erotica, and Best American Mysteries series. He also publishes crazy, DIY books.
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Gina Barreca, Ph.D
Gina Barreca, Ph.D, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor at the University of Connecticut is the author of ten books and recognized internationally as an expert on humor and everyday life. Barreca’s been published by The New York Times, The Independent of London, The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, The Harvard Business Review, and appeared, often as a repeat guest, on the “Today” show, CNN, the BBC, PBS, NPR, and 20/20.Â
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Sarah LaBrie
Sarah LaBrie is the author of No One Gets to Fall Apart: A Memoir, a New York Times Editors’ Pick and Notable Book of 2024. Originally from Third Ward in Houston, Texas, she lives in Los Angeles where she works as a TV writer. She was most recently a producer on the HBO and Starz television show, Minx, and also wrote on Blindspotting (Starz), Made for Love (HBO MAX), and Love, Victor (Hulu/Disney). Her libretti have been performed at Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Apollo Theater. Her fiction appears in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Guernica, Joyland, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Sarah was nominated for Best Television Comedy Script at the 2024 Women's Image Network Awards for her episode of Blindspotting, "By Hook or By Crook". .
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Sarah Fawn Montgomery
Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Halfway from Home (Split/Lip Press, 2022), Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (The Ohio State University Press, 2018) and the poetry chapbooks Regenerate: Poems of Mad Women (Dancing Girl Press, 2017), Leaving Tracks: A Prairie Guide (Finishing Line Press, 2017), and The Astronaut Checks His Watch (Finishing Line Press, 2014). She also has a craft book on unlearning the ableist workshop and developing a disabled writing practice forthcoming with Sundress Publications and a short collection of flash nonfiction forthcoming with Harbor Editions. Her work has been listed as notable in Best American Essays many times, and her poetry and prose have appeared in Brevity, Crab Orchard Review, DIAGRAM, Electric Literature, LitHub, New England Review, The Normal School, Passages North, Poetry Foundation, The Rumpus, Southeast Review, Terrain, and numerous other journals and anthologies. She holds an MFA in creative writing from California State University-Fresno and a PhD in English in creative writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is an Associate Professor at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts.
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Susan Shapiro
Susan Shapiro, an award-winning writer and professor is the bestselling author/coauthor of 17 books her family hates in 8 different genres including Unhooked, The Forgiveness Tour, 5 Men Who Broke My Heart, Lighting Up, The Bosnia List, and her inspiring writing guide, The Byline Bible. She’s freelanced for numerous publications including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, Salon, The New Yorker, and many more. She lives with her scriptwriter husband in Greenwich Village where she’s taught her popular “instant gratification takes too long” courses at The New School, NYU, Columbia University, and in private classes and seminars, which are now online. Her newest writing instruction guide is The Book Bible.
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Hasanthika Sirisena
Hasanthika Sirisena has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and is a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award recipient. Their short story collection The Other One won the Juniper Prize for Fiction and was released in 2016. Their essay collection Dark Tourist (The Ohio State University Press/Mad Creek Books 2021) was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award.
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Teresa Wong
Teresa Wong is the author of the graphic memoir All Our Ordinary Stories (2024) and also Dear Scarlet (2019), which was a finalist for The City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize and longlisted for CBC Canada Reads. Her comics have appeared in The Believer, The New Yorker, McSweeney’s and The Walrus. A teacher of memoir and comics at Gotham Writers Workshop, she was also the 2021–22 Canadian Writer-in-Residence at the University of Calgary.
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